After Armenian independence in the 1990s, the houses of many Tashir residents turned into small cheese factories, and Tashir - a city in the provincial region of Lori - became the city of cheesemakers in Armenia.

Ruben Harutyunyan, head expert at the Tashir State Cheese Factory, set up a small cheese producing unit, Dustr Melanya, in his own backyard after the factory closed down.

"After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the cows were distributed among the villagers, but processing plants stopped operating.  The only thing left was to start producing at home," said Asatur, Ruben Harutyunyan's brother, and the head of production at Dustr Melanya ltd.

Their yard was full of a number of pots, hundreds of liters in volume, while the rooms on the first floor of the house have been transformed into huge refrigerators where the cheese was stored.

People who had earlier only heard of cheesemaking also joined in this business in Tashir.  The driver of the bus to Tashir could not remember a day when the locals did not take cheese with them or send it with another passenger.  One can smell the boiling milk as one walks the streets of town.  Along Kirov Street, one can sometimes see men in white coats come out and greet the driver of the truck carrying vats of milks.

Asatur Harutyunyan said that cheesemaking is continuing to develop in Armenia.  As far as the number of cheesemakers goes, there has definitely been progress, but there are still problems in the areas of quality and food safety.

"Many of the entrepreneurs make cheese using a flawed process," said Harutyunyan, "For example, they don't pasteurize the milk.  If the milk contains microbes that cause brucellosis, then those pass on to the cheese.  They can be eliminated if the cheese is kept in salt water for a long time, but the Lori, Chechil and Suluguni varieties of cheese are kept in brine for a very short period and there is always that danger."

State supervision for food safety is purely a formality - it is conducted only once a year and a fine is always imposed.  "That mechanism won't solve any problems," he was convinced.

Packaging is another important component in the food safety process.  Cheese has to be packed in special material, not just any polyethylene packaging available, as is often the case. 

Asatur Harutyunyan is also a farmer.  "Maybe not in the full sense of the word," he added, "After independence, I got two cows, like the other villagers.  Although I've been working hard over the past 15 years, I still don't have a full-fledged farm."  He was sure that the quality of cheesemaking would improve, if there were farms that would supply milk to the cheese producing and processing units.  That would mean that processing units would have fewer suppliers and could then impose their standards of quality of the milk used.  Cheesemakers today had to work with hundreds of people who handed in 5 to 6 liters of milk every day.

There are around thirty farms in Tashir which have 20 or more heads of cattle, but the amount of milk supplied by them is only about 10 percent of the milk produced in the whole region.

In order to have a good farm, one needs investments, experts, land for growing fodder and animals with good genes.  It is not easy, but everything boils down to finances in the end.

"Farms need to have a minimum head of cattle, certain equipment and special conditions. A farm is not just four walls and a roof - it is a milk factory.  In my opinion, it is wrong to simply provide villagers with loans; plans should be made with people knowledgeable in the field and farms should be built and given to those villagers who would like to work, and the money can be recovered from them in 10 or 20 years.  Villagers have been taken out loans very frequently in recent years, but because of their lack of knowledge their work has not been very focused.  The interest on loans is very high too - it is impossible to get enough profit from agricultural products to pay off 15-16 percent interest and manage to put something aside as well.  Even I avoid taking out loans, even though I am more financially secure than the villagers around me," said the cheesemaking farmer.

Yerevan is the only market for the cheesemakers of Tashir.  The cheese producing units in Tashir are too small for organized export; the products of some of the units are not up to the required standards for export, while in other cases the appreciation of the dram is an obstacle.

Only Dustr Melanya exports cheese abroad from Tashir.  The company exports 70 percent of its produce.  They have partners in the United States and Russia which order the Lori and Chanakh varieties of cheese.  An ethnic Armenian businessman in the US buys their cheese for the Armenian community in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale.